If there was a movie about that rather dark period of my life, the soundtrack would have to be filled with the music from the band Soul Asylum.
It’s the early 1990’s. I’m moving forward in life, fully transitioned into adulthood, taking a few small steps up a corporate ladder I felt compelled to try and climb. The facade of smiles and joviality, lubricated and enhanced with a steady supply of alcohol, diligently disguised the heaviness of doubt and uncertainty swirling within.
Cue Soul Asylum.
There was a relatable rawness in the lyrics of Soul Asylum’s music. Dave Pirner’s songs of emptiness, loss, longing, vulnerability, and frustration so perfectly captured exactly where I was at that time in my life. Eloquently composed, yet painfully accurate.
But it was his popsicles which always saved me.
Like the sun peeking through an ever gloomy and ominously cloudy sky, one lyrical reference always offered a faint source of light in the musical darkness. Each time I hear these words they always bring me back to a more innocent time in my life.
“Standing in the sun with a popsicle, everything is possible…”
I remembered back when life was a clean slate and everything felt possible. As a kid with the sun washing your youthful face and with a popsicle in your hand, life is a wide open highway ready to take you anywhere you want to go. Until life gradually shows up and experience and expectations turn that wide open highway into an unmarked and unpaved backroad endlessly circling back upon itself.
Life does have a way of ripping the popsicle out of your hand and wiping the smile off your now not-so-youthful face, doesn’t it?
Life does get busy. Life does get hard. Practicality often replacing possibility in the process.
Yet possibility always exists. In the light, in the darkness. In the flow, in the struggle. In the peace, and in the pain.
Especially in the darkness, struggle, and the pain.
Our ability to embrace what’s possible for us in any situation begins with our decision to allow ourselves to do so. To allow ourselves to move beyond what we see in front of us and not let the weight of what is prevent us from reclaiming the possibility of what could be.
The image I hold in my mind of me as a little wide-eyed kid standing in the sun holding a popsicle brings a smile to my face. So does the image of this much older wide-eyed version of me doing the exact same thing.
Embrace your possibilities.
You never outgrow who you were created to become.
When was the last time you had a popsicle?
Photo by Alison Marras on Unsplash
Peter Mis LivingHalfFull.com 